Incredible Madhyapradesh! - continued

I don't remember which train we picked for our onward journey;I think it was one of those that go to Delhi from Bangalore but the journey took around thirty-six hours. We reached to Bhopal after sunset. Yes, I remember it was dark. There wasn't much that happened in the train worth talking about. Well, may be not. We had a family as co-passenger, actually a lady with couple of kids. We bought the daily newspaper from the hawker in the morning. Apart from the update, we thought we could use it as the table-spread for dinner/lunch. The lady had different plan. When she saw us folding the paper after we read through it, she asked for that. 'This village lady can read in English? Education system here is so evolved?',I wondered. As soon as she took the paper, her kids snatched that from her, of course not for reading it. She managed to recover three-fourth of it after some time and she asked us if she could keep it. She reasoned, she wanted to read them undisturbed after reaching home. Being encouraged with her interest in reading, we enthusiastically said yes; not having a paper to clean the seat after lunch was less of an issue. But the surprise came when the lunch trays were delivered. She took the paper that she kept so nicely and spread it for her and her kids. We saw them dirtying the papers and then her cleaning the place with the left-out of the papers and then throwing them out of the window without a glint of remorse.
The newspaper served its most useful reason of its existence at that point.
Madhyapradesh was among the poorest of the states with large part of its ares covered under natural forest. Bhopal was a small town and one auto rickshaw came with helping hands , took our bags and delivered us to Hotel Mayura, the ITDC hotel in Bhopal, quite spacious but lacks the glitter of a good hotel. Mostly local politicians filled up the hotels, people coming from other parts of the state to visit the capital, the power centre of politics. People are laid-back but happy; very helpful, candid and unsuspecting. they ask you name and the place where you are coming from but as soon as they hear that you are from different state, their curiosity vanishes.
Saachi is 20 kilometers from Bhopal and you could hire taxi or take the MP tourism bus from the city centre. We thought we could afford the luxury of taxi for such a short journey. Sanchi, before excavation was some local landlord's property and many of the stone pieces were taken by people to their homes before the ASI took the charge of maintaining thhis heritage place. Sanchi was one of the Buddhist university during Mauryan era. It is told that it could take thousand resident scholars and students during its peak time. The magnificent Sanchi Stupa was built by the Emperor Ashoka during his early days. The architecture still amazes you with its symmetry, its awesome stone-engravings and sculptures on the walls. It is unarguably one of the must-visit and well-kept treasures of ancient India. This post contains some of my shots taken on this place. The last shot shows the expanse of the area and the layout of the main residence area. [the story will continue..]

Another Fresco in Time and Space

It is another December, this time. I was thinking of Rajasthan for some time and Sujoy too looked very interested. Sujoy definitely is more diligent than me. At least he was at that time. He did lot of research about possible travel routes and it looked not too difficult to plan a good route although the cost, which included airfare, was not something that could easily go down the throat. Remember that this was before the era of low-cost air-travel. One-way flight to Delhi would cost you ten grands. One way to make it work was to convert the air-trip to train-travel. Only problem was getting the booking in train, all daily trains were booked two months ahead. Sujoy found a travel agent who said that he did arrange this kind of trips but it could be bit costly considering that Rajasthan was hot in the tourists' agenda this year. We did have the courage to ask how costly it would actually be and answer almost knocked me off the chair. Sujoy thought we could take his help only to book the hotels and the travel agent was a very willing and customer-friendly person. He said he would get back to us in next couple of days. After four days when he did not call us, we called him and we were told that the person who spoke to us was out of town. We did get the answer finally after another two days and the answer was "all hotels were booked"!
"We could go home instead", Sujoy suggested. An option that still looked better than wasting the Christmas holidays in office.
"How about visiting Madhya Pradesh?"
"MP?", Sujoy's eyes had muliple exclamation marks. I said, "Look, you heard about Saachi Stupa
and you have not seen it. MP is also known to have largest habitat for tigers and we can stay in one of the tiger reserves for few days [excitement of seeing a tiger in his natural reserve was something that I was betting on]. More importantly since MP is not high on others' agenda this time, we may get booking too and it may not hurt our wallet a lot"
I thought I made a good argument but I was not sure. Sujoy called me after two days and asked about trains to book and I felt that one couldn't expect a faster result. We decided that we will travel by train till Bhopal. We will stay there for couple of days to go around Bhopal and visit Saachi. From there we would go south and visit Kanha and Bandavgarh tiger reserve forests. We would travel to either Kanha or BandahvGarh by road depending on where we get booking first. On the return leg we will go to Jabalpur and pick the train from there. We decided that we would keep the plan flexible except the part that involves train travel since train booking was not very easy to get in short notice. Other reason was that we really did not know much about MP and therefore were not sure how much one could stick to the plan even if one could make one.
Sujoy did all the train booking when we noticed that we would not be able to make both he national parks within the time-budget that we had and decided we will settle for Bandavgarh alone. As you guessed rightly, another [and very strong] reason was that we could not find a tourist lodge that had available rooms.
[..to be continued with photos]